Seeing Things | Henry Evans

A framed botanical print — a monochrome print of some green leaves — hung in our front hall when I was growing up, and I always admired it for its unfussy, graceful simplicity. Later I found out that the print was by Henry Evans and that my parents had acquired it many years earlier when my father was in graduate school in Berkeley, Calif. And, later still, while visiting the small town of St. Helena in the Napa Valley, I walked by a storefront with a sign that read “Henry Evans, Printmaker.” It was one of those aha moments. I put the sign and my parents’ print together, and decided to find out more about Henry Evans.

Evans, a self-taught artist, began making prints in 1958, and his subject matter was always nature. He spent hours in the field, studying plant life and filling his notebooks with drawings. Returning to his San Francisco studio, he redrew his sketches onto the linoleum blocks that he used to make his prints. Evans had a great eye for color and mixed his own inks. He favored bright colors — or perhaps it was the brightly colored plants like California poppies, roses, daffodils and tulips that caught his eye — but also worked in monochrome because a single color could highlight the detail in a drawing. Evans’s images are enchanting because they are so simple. In each one he captures the essence of a plant, whether it is the graceful bend of a stem or a blade of grass, the ragged edge of a leaf, the tightly curled tip of a fern or the distinctive shape of a particular flower. The persimmons, shown above, were the first fruit from a tree that Evans planted himself.

For many years, Evans and his wife, Marsha, who made all the prints, had a gallery in San Francisco. They opened a second space in St. Helena and moved there permanently in the late 1970s. Evans died in 1990, but Marsha continues the business today, producing calendars and note card sets of her husband’s prints that are available through the Henry Evans web site. Although Evans destroyed his linoleum blocks after each print edition was complete, many of his prints can be purchased today. After rediscovering Evans’s joyous images, I’ve become a fan of the calendars and I look forward to each month’s image.